ebrary, a company founded in
February 1999 to establish an online research library, has announced an
unprecedented joint investment by three leading publishing and information
services companies: Random House, Inc., Pearson, and The McGraw-Hill Companies.
This represents the first time these three market leaders have made a mutual
investment in the same company. Terms of the agreement between ebrary and
the investors were not disclosed. The ebrary service was scheduled to launch
this fall and can be found at http://www.ebrary.com.

According to the company, ebrary is creating a collection of authoritative
and valuable content, encompassing books, journals, maps, periodicals,
and digitally archived material, most of which was previously inaccessible
via the Web. Membership is free; however, nonmembers are allowed to search
and view content but aren’t able to purchase it. ebrary patrons may utilize
advanced search technologies to better find the information they need.
ebrary’s InfoTools plug-in enables researchers to directly access supplementary
information from the Internet, including definitions, translations, encyclopedic
references, and maps. ebrary.com uses Adobe PDF format.

ebrary will also provide patrons with a new way to acquire information,
by allowing the copying of text or printing of pages for a photocopier-like
fee. In this manner, ebrary will offer publishers, authors, and information
providers brand-new revenues. By increasing the exposure of copyright-protected
material, ebrary will encourage the purchase of either the physical or
electronic version of titles viewed from a choice of online or local bookstores.
With the ebrary model, participating publishers and information providers
may determine the degree of access and costs associated with each of their
titles.

Users will also be able to pay to securely download whole documents
to disk or into e-book readers, pay to have documents printed on-demand
and delivered, and purchase books and documents from vendor partners.

“The fact that this is the first-ever co-investment by three major
publishers in this space demonstrates the broad range of support for ebrary’s
model and philosophy,” said Christopher Warnock, CEO of ebrary. “ebrary
is now poised, with the help of our partners, to finally make the content
of books, periodicals, and other traditionally printed documents accessible
to everyone on the Internet in a manner that benefits publishers, libraries,
booksellers, and Internet users, while protecting the authors’ copyrights.”